Radio and the 1932
Los Angeles Summer Olympics

Radio’s Role In the Games 80 Years Ago

Part of the Olympic Stadium (Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum) for the opening day ceremonies at the 1932 Summer
Olympics.

By Jim Hilliker

Several months before the 2012 Summer Olympic Games got
underway in London, I had been thinking about what it was like
at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. More
specifically, I wanted to determine if radio played a
significant part in the promotion and coverage of the Summer
Olympics that year, from July 30 to August 14. I was
surprised to find out that no live radio coverage of the games
was allowed and that there were very few radio broadcasts which
reported on the outcome of the Olympics each day. It is
quite a contrast between 1932 and today, when pretty much
everything that takes place during the 2012 Summer Olympics will
be seen and heard from beginning to end. An estimated
one-billion people around the world were expected to watch the
opening ceremonies on television. But I was still
satisfied to learn a lot which I never knew before about radio’s
part in the 1932 Summer Games.

Historical Background

It was 80 years ago when Los Angeles hosted the 10th
modern Olympiad, better known as the 1932 Summer Olympics.
The competition took place at the Coliseum (it was called
Olympic Stadium during the games) and various other locations in
Southern California. Those locations included the Rose Bowl in
Pasadena for cycling; Olympic Auditorium for boxing, wrestling
and weightlifting; Los Angeles Harbor for sailing; Long Beach
Marine Stadium for rowing; Los Angeles Swimming Stadium near the
Coliseum for water polo, swimming and diving events; plus six
other sites.

Because of the Great Depression, fewer than half of the
participants from the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam competed
in 1932. There were 1,332 athletes (1,206 men and 126
women) at the 1932 Los Angeles games from 37 nations.
(Organizers were hoping for some 2,000 athletes from 50
countries to take part.) Compare that to the nearly 6,800
athletes from 140 nations who were in Los Angeles for the 1984
Summer Olympics. This year’s 30th modern Olympiad
games in London will feature some 10,000 athletes from 204
nations. Still, the large attendance figures for opening
day and all of the events of the Summer Games were much more
than had been anticipated. Also, the 1932 Los Angeles
Summer Olympics was the first time the Olympics turned a profit
for the host city!

The 1932 games in Los Angeles gave birth to the modern format
for the Olympics. Between 1900 and 1928, no Summer Games had
been shorter than 79 days. But, in Los Angeles, this was cut to
just 16 days. It has remained between 15 and 18 days ever
since. Other firsts in L.A. in 1932 included the male
athletes being housed in a single Olympic Village (the women
stayed in a luxury hotel), and medal winners stood on a podium
for the first time as the flag of the winner was raised.

Some of the more famous American winners at the ’32 Games
included these names: Babe Didrikson: She won 2 gold medals in
the javelin and the hurdles event, and won a silver medal in the
high jump. Didrikson was later a champion golfer. In
1950, she was named by the Associated Press “the Greatest Female
Athlete of the First Half of the Twentieth Century.”
Eddie Tolan: He won gold medals in the 100 meter and
200 meter sprint events; Helene Madison: She won 3 gold medals
in freestyle swimming (she was the first woman to win 3 gold
medals at the Olympics); and Georgia Coleman: She won a gold and
a silver medal in diving events.

In all the United States came away with 41 Gold Medals, 32
Silver and 30 Bronze for a total of 103 medals. The USA
was followed by Italy, France, Sweden and Japan. Great
Britain finished 8th in the overall medal count and
Australia came in 10th in the medal count. New
Zealand, which sent 21 athletes to compete in four sports went
home with just one medal, a Silver for rowing.

One thing I noticed in researching the 1932 L.A. Summer
Olympics was that I could find very little on the topic of
security for the athletes and spectators. There is some
mention of security guards dressed as cowboys at the men’s
Olympic Village in Baldwin Hills, but there apparently was no
huge security force in place, such as we have today for the
Olympics. Also, Los Angeles police officers had a plan in
place for traffic control and crowd control at the various
Olympic venues.

Were there commercial sponsors or corporate sponsors such as
the Olympics have today? There was a degree of commercialism
here and there, but nothing that resembles the commercialism
that surrounds the Olympics and its athletes in the 21st
Century.

No Live Broadcasts of the 1932 Summer Games

While sporting events such as boxing, football and baseball had
been described on radio since 1921, radio broadcasts of the
Olympic Games were limited in 1928 and 1932.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be any record of any radio
broadcasts of the Summer Games in Paris in 1924.

NBC special events announcer George Hicks (1905-1965),
when he described the events at the 1932 Winter
Olympics for NBC radio. He later was with NBC’s Blue
Network and ABC, and was primarily a news reporter and
commentator after 1941.

I discovered that live broadcasts of the Olympics were not
allowed from the Los Angeles games 80 years ago.
This decision was made despite the fact that both
NBC and CBS had been allowed to broadcast most of the events at
the 1932 Winter Olympics from Lake Placid, New York, between
February 4 and February 15, 1932. NBC used announcer
George Hicks to call the action from nearly every venue, while
CBS relied on their popular sportscaster Ted Husing (pictured at
left). The Los Angeles Times radio listings each day
indicate that NBC affiliate KFI and CBS affiliate KHJ aired the
Winter Olympics coverage in Southern California.

Ted Husing (1901-1962), who also reported on
the Winter Olympics for CBS in February of 1932.
Husing was the top play-by-play sports broadcaster for
CBS in the 1920s and ’30s. His opinions often got him
into trouble. He was banned from announcing the World
Series by the Commissioner of Baseball, because he
criticized the umpires on the air during the 1934
World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the
Detroit Tigers.

In the March 13, 1932, Los Angeles Times radio column
by William Hamilton Kline, he reported that Don Lee, owner of
KHJ and the Don Lee Broadcasting System, had made a pitch in a
letter to Zack J. Farmer, the general secretary of the Olympic
Committee. Lee’s proposal was to broadcast “two hours of
the most spectacular Olympic events” daily during the sixteen
days of the games. The broadcasts were to be heard across
the nation on 90 stations affiliated with the CBS and Don Lee
networks, and via shortwave radio beamed overseas. But,
apparently, the IOC and/or the Los Angeles Olympic Committee
rejected any plan for live broadcasts of the games.

Why then was radio not allowed to broadcast live from the
Summer Olympics that year? Apparently the organizers of
the Los Angeles 1932 games were afraid that live radio
broadcasts would keep paying customers away from the Coliseum
and the other venues to witness the events in person, which
would hurt ticket sales. This was the same reason many
Major League baseball team owners in the 1930s refused to allow
their games to be on the radio, as they argued that broadcasting
the games would keep the fans away from the ballpark. Also, in
March of 1932, some eastern universities such as Harvard and
Yale decided that they would not allow any of their college
football games to be broadcast on the radio that fall. So,
it appears that the NBC and CBS live coverage of the 1932 Winter
Olympics was an exception to the rule at that time.
Another factor in not having the Los Angeles Summer Olympics
broadcast live may have been pressure from newspapers, which
also feared being “scooped” by radio during the 1930s, when it
came to news and sports.

It wasn’t until the 1936 summer games in Berlin that live radio
broadcasts of some of the events were heard in the USA at
various intervals. The opening day ceremonies in 1936 were heard
in Los Angeles at 8 a.m. Pacific Time via NBC on both KFI and
KECA, while KHJ listeners heard the CBS network feed from
Germany. Most of the regular events during the 1936 summer
Olympics were heard mainly on KFI via NBC on Saturday and
Sunday, and not as much on weekdays. Los Angeles Times
sports reporter and columnist Bill Henry (1890-1970) also helped
cover the 1936 Summer Games for CBS. When the Times
owned KHJ between 1922 and 1927, Henry first went on the air at
KHJ in 1922 announcing news and sports broadcasts, including
college football during the 1920s and ’30s. Henry was also
a sports technical advisor for the organizing Committee of the
Xth Olympiad in Los Angeles, between 1928 and 1932.

Radio’s Role in the Los Angeles Summer Olympics

According to the 1932 Official Report on the Summer Games
prepared by the Los Angeles organizing committee, it did briefly
mention radio broadcasts:

A number of large radio advertisers built their
programs around the Games. One series of broadcasts, given
weekly, consisted of dramatizations of recreated past Olympiads
beginning with the first Games of which there is record and
moving swiftly to the Games of the modern era. Other programs
featured the Olympic Games in music, talks by athletic experts
and interviews by past Olympic champions.

The movie capitol of Hollywood also helped to promote the Los
Angeles Olympics to potential tourists across the U.S.A. and
around the word. On May 22, 1932 at noon Pacific Time, an
international broadcast was made from the studios of the Don
Lee-CBS network station, KHJ. The half-hour program over
CBS and sent overseas by shortwave radio was Los Angeles’
official invitation to attend the Tenth Olympiad. Several
movie stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Maureen O’Sullivan, Bela
Lugosi, Jimmy Durante, Delores Del Rio, Stan Laurel and Oliver
Hardy took part. European listeners were invited to the
Games in several languages. Another similar radio program
was broadcast in July just before the start of the Games.
It aired on July 7th at 8 pm over KECA and the NBC
network from the Hollywood Bowl, the men’s Olympic Village and
the Coliseum (Olympic Stadium). It was called “Come to the
Olympics” and featured Douglas Fairbanks and his wife Mary
Pickford, along with comedian Will Rogers.

When the time finally arrived for the Olympics to begin,
Southern California radio fans would soon learn the plans that
were made for radio to deal with the situation. KHJ at 900 on
the radio dial had made a deal with the Los Angeles Times
which would benefit both the radio station and the newspaper,
and hopefully KHJ’s listeners too. Radio columnist Doug Douglas
described the situation this way for his readers on July 29,
1932 in the Los Angeles Times:

The Times and KHJ have perfected the most
complete official system yet devised to overcome the
circumstance that no radio station is permitted to broadcast
directly from the Coliseum or any of the other points at which
Olympic events are to be held. Immediately following
official announcement of the results, The Times Tower,
over KHJ, will bring to your speaker the name of the winner,
character of the event and the time.

While no live coverage was broadcast in 1932, it appears
several other radio stations reported on the results at the
Olympics each day, including KFI-640, KECA-1430, KFAC-1300 and
KFWB-950. But Doug Douglas in the Los Angeles Times
told his readers that KHJ was the best station to listen to for
the latest news from the Olympics each day, from July 30 to
August 14.

At 5 p.m. on July 30th, which was the opening day of
the Olympics, KHJ was scheduled to broadcast a detailed
explanation of the scoring system used at the Games. Douglas
went on to write in his column that KHJ would broadcast official
flashes every day detailing the progress of the various
events. “In addition to the scheduled flashes, Braven
Dyer, ace of the Times sports announcers, will bring a
complete word picture of each day’s contests, with the scores
worked out in the point system. Noted visiting sports
writers will frequently give their version of the Games as they
progress.”

The newspaper also printed their official Olympic broadcasting
schedule for the first four days of the 10th Olympic
Games. Besides the flash announcement of winners each day, KHJ
was to broadcast results each day at 5 pm and 10 pm. On
July 30th, after the 5 pm description of how to keep
a day-by-day score in points of every event, the 10 pm broadcast
featured Braven Dyer with a ten-minute eyewitness description of
the opening ceremonies and the progress of the weight lifting
contest, the first of the scheduled events. Douglas
concluded his column that day this way: “Get your scorecard, cut
out your schedule each day, dial KHJ and the Times Tower. In
other words, if you haven’t a ticket, tune in.”

That day, the Times radio column headline proclaimed: “Olympic
Inaugural Radio’s Peak. Games Opening Feature Today.” But
there was no live radio broadcast of the Opening
Ceremonies. KHJ featured Braven Dyer at 10 pm doing his
best to give listeners a word picture of the opening ceremonies
and events contested. Doug Douglas added that “Every day Don C.
of the Times will flash over KHJ official results, as the events
scheduled are concluded. Point the dial to KHJ and let ’er
ride.”

I should add that John Braven Dyer (1900-1983) was a
sportswriter and a sports columnist for the Los Angeles
Times between 1925 and 1964. During some of those
years, he was also heard on radio as a sportscaster or
commentator, especially on early USC football games on radio in
the 1920s and ’30s, and had his own sports show on KFI, KMPC and
KNX between 1945 and 1960. Dyer is credited with creating the
nickname “Thundering Herd” for the great USC football teams of
the 1920s and ’30s.

Aside from what he wrote about the Olympics on July 29 and 30,
Doug Douglas wrote very little about the games in his radio
columns for the next two weeks. For instance, on August 2, 1932,
all he put in the column that day was this: “Going to the
Olympic Games? If you cannot, listen to Don C., intermittently
throughout the events (KHJ), and fold up with Braven Dyer’s
review of each day’s contests. KHJ at 10 p.m.” We never do
learn what the C stands for in Don’s last name. The Times and
KHJ also teamed up each day to present world-wide news on the
radio station each day at 7:15 a.m., 12:30, 5:15 and 10:10 p.m.

In another column, Douglas says a reader wrote in to ask what
to do about a neighbor who leaves their radio on all day. He
replies that they should persuade them to enter the radio in the
Olympic Marathon. On August 11, his radio column features a
1 p.m. broadcast on KHJ of “The Times Forum” on “The Drama of
the Olympiad.” Douglas wrote that John Scott, a member of
the Times staff would “relate some of the heart-breaking tremolo
touches of the grueling contests. There are tragedies at
the tape and in the locker rooms quite unobserved by even the
most wide awake Olympic fan.”

Other Radio Coverage of the Games

The daily radio program log in the newspaper did not change
much from day to day, when it came to listing anything to do
with the Olympics. For instance, on Saturday August 6, KFI
carried an NBC program called The Olympian; KECA presented
Olympic news at 8 p.m.; KFAC did the same at 9 p.m.; KHJ at 10
p.m. and KFI’s Olympic news report was at midnight. On
August 7, KHJ aired an Olympic summary at 10:30 a.m and noon;
KFI was broadcasting a program that was heard over at least part
of the NBC network at 2 p.m. called The International Goodwill
Special, in which representatives of 20 nations taking part in
the Olympics were scheduled to be on the program; KHJ presented
another Olympic summary at 3 p.m.; KECA had Olympic news at 8
p.m.; KHJ’s Olympic summary of the day’s events with Braven Dyer
aired at 10 p.m. and KFI had Olympic news at midnight.

During most of the Olympics, KHJ aired their regular reports on
the games three or four times a day, along with their frequent
“flashes” of the results of various events as those
concluded. KECA, KFAC and KFI also were listed, though
KFI’s report on the Olympics was only at midnight, except for
one night when it was broadcast at 11 p.m. KFWB was listed only
a few times with Olympic news.

There doesn’t seem to be any special broadcast for the final
day of the games on August 14, 1932. KFI did air one more
NBC broadcast on the games at 8 p.m., listed in the paper as the
“Olympic Officials Special.” KHJ aired its final report on
the Olympics at 10 that night and KFI at midnight.

I also checked radio listings in New York City during the
games. Two stations did much the same thing as the L.A.
stations. WABC (now WCBS-880) presented a report on the
day’s events at the games each night from 11 to 11:15 p.m., and
WJZ (now WABC-770) did the same thing at midnight. The
same thing was done in Washington, D.C. The NBC affiliate
WRC aired a 15-minute summary of the Olympics each night,
usually at 11 p.m., while the CBS station WMAL, presented a
summary of the games each day at 10:30 p.m., which also lasted
for 15 minutes.

KFI’s Special Part in the 1932 Olympics

The two weeks that KFI presented Olympic news at midnight
deserves some special attention here. It was a broadcast
conducted by a Hollywood movie actress from New Zealand named
Nola Luxford (1895-1994). The broadcast was created to
deliver results of the summer games, mainly for listeners in New
Zealand and Australia, focusing on how the athletes from those
two countries did at the Olympics each day.

Miss Luxford’s story of how she became a radio announcer for
KFI in the summer of 1932 is told in her biography published in
2000. It is titled Angel of the Anzacs: The Life of
Nola Luxford by Carole Van Grondelle.

Sometime before the Olympics began, KFI had received letters
from the New Zealand Athletics Association and the New Zealand
Broadcasting Board. They asked if KFI could arrange daily
broadcasts of the results of the Olympics involving the team
from their country. This way, New Zealand would not have to wait
a day or two for the results to appear in the
newspaper. With KFI’s power increase to 50,000 watts the
previous year, they explained that KFI’s night sky wave signal
was often heard in July, during the colder New Zealand nights,
where it was winter down under.

A KFI representative called Luxford and asked her if she knew
of a man from New Zealand who could do the job. Nola
thought that she could handle the job as well as any man. She
drove to KFI the next day, where station manager Carl Haverlin
introduced her to program director Glenn Dolberg. (Dolberg
later became Luxford’s third husband in 1959) In later
years, Carl Haverlin left KFI to become President of Broadcast
Music Incorporated (BMI). Glenn Dolberg also moved on to
BMI as Vice-President of Station Relations in the 1950s.

Glenn Dolberg, taken when he was with KHJ in
1930. As program director of KFI in 1932, he hired
Nola Luxford to re-create the 1932 Summer Olympics on
KFI at midnight for two weeks. The broadcasts were for
New Zealand and Australia. In later years, Dolberg
would follow his former KFI boss Carl Haverlin and go
to work for Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) as
Vice-President in charge of Station Relations.

She explained her idea of going on the air each night at
midnight, when it would be 8 pm the next evening in New
Zealand. Dolberg looked at her skeptically and said,
“Whoever heard of a girl broadcasting sports events?” She
replied confidently that she was certain she could do it, if KFI
would give her the chance. Dolberg said he would think it
over and let her know. A few days later, he telephoned her
and said the station would give here a ‘try’.

At the time, it was felt that unless a woman was giving
household hints, or worked as an actress or a singer on a radio
program, the public did not wish to hear a woman’s voice on the
radio. Some radio engineers argued that a woman’s voice
was too high-pitched and above the audio frequencies of radio
reproduction. This type of thinking is why in most cases, few
women were heard on the radio in this country until well into
the 1970s.

In Van Grondelle’s book on Luxford, she writes that Dolberg
likely gave Nola the KFI job because he could tell she had the
trained voice of an actress, but with a lower register that
would be pleasing to the ear on the AM radios of the day.
The program director was also taken by what the writer called
Nola’s “intelligent and spirited personality, which he felt
would project well over the air.”

An estimated 500,000 people were in Los Angeles for the next
two weeks, which added to the city’s nearly 1.5 million
population. Van Grondelle, who interviewed Luxford for her
book and had access to her diaries, photos, etc., found that
part of her first KFI script had been found from the Opening Day
of the Summer Games. This is how Luxford described the
scene to KFI listeners, many hours after it had ended:

It is a gorgeous day, Sunday, the 31st of
July, 1932. (The opening ceremonies took place on the 30th
in Los Angeles, but it was the next day for her target audience
in New Zealand and Australia.) We are in this huge stadium,
surrounded by one hundred and five thousand cheering, excited
people, and the Parade of Nations, with two thousand of the
world’s greatest athletes, assembled to take the Oath of the
Olympiad. It is one of those days when one’s soul seems to
be stirred to its very depths.

As for how she prepared for each night’s broadcast, Nola was
busy from morning until afternoon, going from one Olympic venue
to the next with her press pass. She would then go back to
her apartment to write her script at the end of the day. Late at
night, she drove to KFI to take her place before the
microphone. KFI apparently could not give Nola a
producer. But she had two engineers who helped mix her
microphone and gave her some basic sound effects of the roar of
the crowd and the crowd’s applause. When the broadcast was
over, she returned home and was up early the next day to start
over again.

To re-create each day’s events, she used the present tense and
described each event as if they were happening as she spoke to
the listeners. She not only focused on the New Zealand
athletes, but tried to give an overview of every event each day,
and the human interest stories surrounding all of the
athletes. One of her popular features was her nightly
sign-off, “Good night, mother dear.” Van Grondelle wrote
that it was as if Nola was talking to all mothers, as she
saluted her own in New Zealand.

Her favorite moment described in the book was when she watched
the rowing competition from the Goodyear blimp in Long
Beach. In one race, four crews were within one boat length
at the finish, as the USA finally beat the Italians by a very
thin margin. In describing the end of the race, Nola said,
“We feel as exhausted as the young men slumped over their oars.”

When it all came to an end, Nola described the Closing Ceremony
for KFI listeners this way:

The trumpeters play Taps, the torch goes out, the
Olympic flag slowly comes down, as the sun is setting over the
Pacific. The Olympic Games are over. Tears stream down the faces
of many of the spectators. It is a solemn moment, as
though we have lost a dear friend. The Olympic Games have
passed into history.

The author wrote that Glenn Dolberg had fired Nola because NBC
had given him a hard time about hiring her. But when
thousands of cards, letters and telegrams flooded in from around
the Pacific to praise Nola on her descriptions of the games and
congratulate KFI for putting her on the air, she was given her
job back. The total was later given as around 50,000
letters from Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and from California
to New York and Canada.

Nola Luxford spent the next four years at KFI as a freelance
radio producer, presenter and Mistress of Ceremonies. From
1932 to 1936, she had organized some 20 special international
goodwill broadcasts for Christmas, Easter, and Armistice
Day. She presented all the programs herself. With
her Hollywood film connections, she was able to get movie stars
to take part, along with famous writers, musicians, plus many
well-known bands, orchestras and choirs.

In 1936, Luxford moved to New York City and was part of NBC’s
short-lived “Four Star News” program in 1939. The Four Star
News was designed to give listeners a round-up of the week’s
main news events, plus any late-breaking news that
day. This news program lasted only 13 weeks until
mid-November of 1939, but was not renewed by NBC.

During World War II, Nola formed the Anzac Club in New York
(for Australia-New Zealand Army Corps) for soldiers from her
country. She helped to make shortwave broadcasts of
soldiers’ personal messages to relatives in New Zealand.
Miss Luxford’s wartime efforts earned her the Order of the
British Empire from King George VI and the U.S. Award of Merit
from President Harry S. Truman.

Nola married former KFI program director Glenn Dolberg in 1959.
He died in 1977. She spent her last decades in La Canada
Flintridge, where Glenola Park is named in the couple’s
honor. Miss Luxford died in Pasadena in 1994.

Helene Madison, “the wonder girl of Seattle,” who
won 3 gold medals in swimming;
sports writer Grantland Rice;
Babe Didrikson, who won two gold medals and one silver medal
in track and field events and later became a champion golfer;
Will Rogers, vaudeville entertainer, political humorist, actor
and radio personality;
Georgia Coleman, who gold and silver medals in diving events;
Braven Dyer, Los Angeles Times sports writer and radio
sportscaster, who reported on the Summer Games for KHJ radio
in 1932.

Some Final Thoughts

The world has changed so much in the 80 years since the
Olympics were held in Los Angeles in 1932. Radio was only in its
10th year of regular broadcasting in Southern
California. There were 17 radio stations in the Los Angeles
region and 604 stations in the United States. Network radio was
still evolving and adding new radio shows in 1932, which
featured many vaudeville stars who were trying out the
medium. Those included Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, Fred
Allen, Jack Benny and Ed Wynn. Other new national shows on
network radio were Buck Rogers, The Adventures of Charlie Chan,
One Man’s Family, Tarzan, Vic and Sade and The Shadow.
Singers and band music also filled the airwaves.

The Great Depression had brought the price of a radio in the
U.S.A. down from $139 in 1929 to roughly $47 by 1933. But
radio was a form of entertainment people wanted, despite their
struggles to pay rent and buy food for their families. By 1929,
about 33% of U.S. homes owned a radio and by 1933, that figure
was close to 60%. In addition to that, radios were
improving in quality and gave listeners better reception.
It was estimated that by 1933, 4.5 million radios would become
obsolete. Radio sales in the early-1930s increased due to
“installment buying” or buying on credit. In 1931, 75% of all
radios were sold on installment payments. The average down
payment for a radio was 20%. But many in the United States
could not find a job when the Olympics came to Los Angeles and
could not afford to buy a radio. The unemployment rate in August
of 1932 was 25%, the highest it had reached during the
Depression.

Not only is radio different today, but the entire world of
communications has changed drastically in the past 30
years. For the games this summer in London, there’s global
television coverage by satellite, which could only be dreamed of
in 1932.
The home broadcaster, the BBC in Britain, will broadcast all
5,000 hours of the games through various channels. In the
United States, NBC paid $1.181 billion to carry the games. NBC
will also partner with YouTube to provide a livestream of the
events. The summer Olympics will be seen and heard around the
world.

As for radio, the 2012 Olympics will still be heard on radio
through Fox Sports Radio over KLAC-570 in Los Angeles and the
ESPN network over KSPN-710 in L.A. Olympic results will also be
presented on KNX-1070 during regular sports segments.

Both the Olympics and radio would go through many changes over
the decades. The United States and the world were so different
in 1932 and today. The same goes for radio, and television
in most homes was still a dream of the distant future to most
Americans in 1932. I hope I have been able to describe at
least some of what radio tried to do in 1932, when it came to
promoting and reporting on the events of the Los Angeles Summer
Olympics.

Main Sources Used

I would like to thank the LA ’84 Foundation for providing me
access to the digital archives of their sports library.
From their collection, I gathered information from the
Spring-1997 Journal of Olympic History article “Radio Sports
Broadcasting in the United States and Its Influence on the
Olympic Games” by John McCoy, page 22. I also found some useful
information in Volume XI-2002 of Olympika-The International
Journal of Olympic Studies from page 87 of an article by Jeremy
White entitled “The Los Angeles Way of Doing Things—The Olympic
Village and the Practice of Boosterism in 1932.”

The LA ’84 Foundation Website also was the source for the photo
of NBC radio reporter George Hicks and some information about
the broadcasts of the 1932 Winter Olympics. Another item
from their site which helped in my article was the Xth Olympiad
Los Angeles 1932 Official Report. I also took information
from the Los Angeles Times radio columns of February
4-15, 1932; March 13, 1932; May 22, 1932; July 7, 1932; July 29
and 30, 1932; and the radio program listings from the Los
Angeles Times of May 23, 1932; July 7, 1932; and July 30
through August 15, 1932.

I found the material on KFI’s part in the 1932 Los Angeles
Summer Olympics while doing a random search on the internet.
This was all taken from a book on an actress from New Zealand
who had arrived in Hollywood during the silent movie era.
The book is Angel of the Anzacs: The Life of Nola Luxford
by Carole Van Grondelle, and it was published in 2000.